


where we go from here

by dancerinthedrink



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Amsterdam, Canon Divergence, Deepthroating, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Not Beta Read, Oral Sex, no homo your way out of this decker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-21 09:14:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19999501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancerinthedrink/pseuds/dancerinthedrink
Summary: After a successful art heist, Theo gets the blowjob Boris promised him.





	where we go from here

We ate at Blake’s. Whiskey flasks upended into coffee mugs, hunks of Edam cheese, French fries smothered in mayonnaise, herring in brine. Boris flirted incessantly with our tired-eyed waitress while Gyuri, Victor, and Shirley chattered in unfollowable Ukrainian about the girls they would rent, a conversation, in between mouthfuls of rookworst, I only grasped by the increasing distances they held their cupped hands in front of their chests.

For my part, I couldn’t eat. My stomach was in sailor knots, Gordian and constricting in the best way possible like the sense of safety from an airplane seatbelt pulled too tight over your lap. Only the vodka Gyuri had stashed under the front seat made it past my lips on his celebratory instance, barely strong enough to get me tipsy in my early days but was as potent as heroin today. The alcohol rushed to my brain at record speed so when we were walking back to the car I wobbled and giggled like a schizophrenic, barely able to sit upright next to Boris who jostled my arm like it was a video game joystick, bouncing along with every pothole in the road. He nosed under my arm and left a kiss on my cheek, heavy and wet; the bone under my skin ached with its force.

When we got back to my hotel Boris told Gyuri to drive around the block a couple of times while we stored the painting up in my room.

Neither of us could stop moving. I vibrated like a plucked cello string while Boris paced the elevator, skipped down the hall ahead of me, tap-danced in front of the door as I rummaged through my pockets for the key card. 

A swipe and a beep and a click. We were in the room. The painting was in the room. 

It was safe.

With trembling hands, I punched in the code to the safe and slid the painting inside, finally letting out a breath once I heard the automated lock. 

The nervous energy that had sustained me for the past hour vanished, and I collapsed against the bedframe. I expected to get a few seconds of quiet but whatever quiet I did achieve was shattered when Boris tackled me to the ground.

“We did it! We did it, Potter!” He cried, his hands all over me; even over my clothes his touches, though sloppy and directionless, were as clear as though he was squeezing my naked hand back in sun-baked Vegas. He was like an overexcited puppy - yelping, pawing - and I pushed him off, pushed my glasses up from where they’d fallen askew, out of breath. Resting on his knees, he cocked his head to the side with his bottom lip stuck out mournfully, on the precipice of a protestation.

I pinched the bridge of my nose like Mrs. Barbour used to do whenever Kitsey and Toddy were squabbling to prevent herself from frowning and getting wrinkles. 

“Fuck, Boris,” I said.

“Yes. Let’s go fuck,” he said eagerly. My eyes shot open and looked over to him warily. He was shucking off his snow-wet coat, tossed it on the radiator, turned off, its white paint chipping away. “Red light district or over to Antwerp. You know French, _oui_?”

“Uhhh…” 

“No matter. Won’t be doing much talking if you know what I mean?” He grinned, teeth bared. 

I slumped, laughing. “Go without me.” Using the last of my strength, I heaved myself onto the bed (which I didn’t even notice was made up until the pulled-smooth comforter was under my stomach) and, face buried in the pillow, sighed, ignoring the bite of my glasses frame at the side of my eyes, ready to drift into some oblivion.

“Come _on_ ,” he begged from the floor. He tried to stand but got his rubber-soled shoes tangled in his overly long scarf and fell back, hard, onto the carpet. Nursing his bruised knee, he laughed drunkenly.

“No,” I said simply, playfully. Despite his insanities, it was nice to have Boris back. 

The few friends I’d made in New York since returning were either the boyfriends of Kitsey’s friends, equally as awkward as me not to bother with the cheery country club and stock market tips banter, or were druggies who shared my dealer. Even the off the wall addicts with their explosions of laughter (out of nowhere, a car alarm going off in the middle of a grocery store parking lot in the middle of the night) and greasy locks of hair couldn’t match Boris in his creativity and kindness. 

Occasionally, while in Brighton, I’d hear a snatch of Russian grawlix from a bear sized fishmonger and think of Boris, or double back in the library stacks whenever Dostoyevsky was present on the shelves, or be mesmerized by a late-night James Bond marathon on the TV for God-knows-why.

We’d only spent a measly two years together yet we had spent the whole of those two years by each other’s sides and every word and action committed in those days was imprinted in the far recesses of my memory, to be buoyed to the surface at the drop of a hat.

So when Boris flopped on the bed next to be, using his sharp elbows to nudge me to one side, I felt only a happy nostalgia blooming warm in my chest and not the wariness I would have felt had any other man besides him done the same.

He turned on his side, his laughter working out of him in little heaves like he was recovering from sobbing, and - his murky curls falling over his eyes, pussy willows prison-barring a clear lake - whispered, “We did it, Theo.”

He was right.

When he had told me he had taken the painting, all the years of panic and loss as I would have felt if I had known crashed over me like an unstable mass of drywall, knocking me down and burying me in rubble. My throat had closed up. My body couldn’t live without the painting and tried to kill itself as a reflex.

Really, Boris had the painting longer than I had and whatever museum collection it was shopped along with had had it even longer but it was still _my_ painting. Unequivocally so.

But, I think I would be able to share it with Boris in a kind of Leninesque transition from capitalism to socialism to communism like with our ownership of Popper. Just being around the thing for so long, taking equal care and having an equal interest in the thing slowly transferred and melded possession of it into something more nebulous than _mine_ and _his_. 

“Yeah,” I said, sleep already fogging up my throat. “I guess we did.”

“Then we celebrate.” 

“No.” 

He rose up with a devilish grin on his face. I repeated myself, the fear in my voice playing antithetical to the smile that grew wider and wider as he tried to climb on me. I was able to fend him off enough that he couldn’t his legs over me. 

He shook me back and forth chanting in Ukranian, the mattress a mass of jiggling flan under him, shaking a fit of giggles from me that I much tried to smother. Ghost-white teeth flashed in the sun. 

“Boris, Boris… Boris! Ack!” His knee planted itself roughly into the pit of my stomach and, reflexively, I threw him off of me. I wrenched myself over and lay prostrate as the pain ebbed and I breathed in the smell of industrial bleach on the pillowcase.

“No fun anymore,” Boris said good-naturedly from his spot on the floor.

“You go with Gyuri. Have your girl. We can meet for dinner. Room service.” My voice came out very strained, in fits and starts. I didn’t want to leave the painting alone. All I wanted to do was stay in my hotel room until the flight home. What I would do with it when I got back, I had no idea but I could figure that out later.

“Potter,” he groaned. “I have to take you out. Is not good for you to be closed up like-- like-- The opposite of claustrophobia. The one where people can’t leave their houses?”

“Agoraphobia?”

He slapped the mattress; it made a sound like a suction cup being flipped inside out. “That one! Yes. Like an agoraphobia.”

I rolled down to the side of the bed he’d fallen off and peeked over the edge. His button-down was greying with sweat (excitement) even though cold air was being piped in from ridges on the floor and his suit jacket had been cast aside as well. He wore a bitten lip and drop of blood on his philtrum; a ruby stick-on beauty spot.

“When’d you get a nosebleed,” I said dreamily. I reached out to him to wipe it away. “Is it my fault?” 

The blood fell into my thumbnail, the wetness of it tracing the bit of tough skin there. A crimson smear was spread over his cupid’s bow. The pad of my thumb pushed lightly over his lips. 

It all felt like a kind of dream. The painting, Amsterdam, Boris in front of me. A too-good-to-be-true scenario I didn’t deserve and at any point I would wake up back in New York, on a park bench, empty plastic baggy of opioid powder in my pocket. The bridge of my glasses were pushed awkwardly off my nose, giving everything doubled fish-eye look to it. But it had to be real. I could hear my heartbeat reverberate through the down of the mattress. Boris’s eyes were dark in mine. His lips were scuffed and dry.

Unannounced, Boris took the tip of my thumb into his mouth. 

He brought his hands up from where they had been laying uselessly at his sides to hold my wrist; all the strength had gone out of it. 

Small buds caressed my fingerprint. I wondered idly if he could taste the iron and salt tang of his own blood. As he took my thumb deeper into his mouth, wiry unshaved hairs on his chin chafed my raw knuckles.

The point of his tongue licked up and down the underside of my thumb so that when he reached the top, the peach-like cleft brushed against me and the warm, fleshy underside engulfed my finger. He alternated to undulating his tongue, the soft muscle hitting rhythmically the broken lines on my thumb. He watched my pulse go mad in the purple and blue tubes beneath my skin.

I was glad I was on my stomach because a yearning had started to grow between my legs. Shuffling discreetly to pull my hand from him, a lump in the blanket hit me and I let out a gasp Boris didn’t notice; he was busy moving his head to follow the retreat of my thumb.

“Boris…” I said. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a warning or an affirmation. He took my thumb from his mouth.

“Theo.” 

At last, he raised his gaze to me and it was an icicle to the heart.

He dropped my hand; it swung deadly with the weight of a thousand half-remembered nights just out of its grasp. On one knee, never taking his eyes from mine, he rose and I skirted back, fearful of what was going to happen.

“Can I-- Boris, please. Could I just have a minute?” I wished I had taken off my coat, but it didn’t matter as Boris rose and shoved it from my shoulders; it tangled around my hands. He sunk down again, his hands on my belt.

Music fell from the buckle when he unlocked it. 

Burning up, I shoved my coat off and flung it over his head in time to see him peel down the waistband of my underwear to expose me to the coolness of the hotel suite and the heat of his breath. With no hesitation, he swallowed my cock.

My hands flew to his hair, intending to pull him off, but the head of my cock hit the back of his throat and, weakly, I moaned. He echoed me and the vibration was almost unbearable.

My breath came out in shuttering bursts, whistling through my clenched teeth, as I tried to hold back the sounds that threatened to push past my lips. A droplet of something wet fell at my waist and it could have either been blood or sweat. It was almost gross, two street junkies working through the priapism of withdrawal, needy and desperate. 

I should’ve been more forceful, stopped him before it could get this far, use my words, my fists, but his movements (my coat, my belt, my cock) had been so purposeful, so determined, I could only sit in astonishment at his worship of my body. A body he hadn’t seen, let alone touched, for a decade.

Around the root of my cock his lips were stretched wide, paling with effort. To my disappointment, he drew off me until he got his lips on the head, sucking softly, licking the drops of precum away in long strips.

Then, like a deep-sea diver, descended again. 

Unable to hold myself up anymore, my legs slowly completing their metamorphosis into jelly, I reclined on the bed, vainly searching for purchase on the blanket. Boris lowered one of his hands to palm at himself through his trousers; the little grunts and groans he let out around my cock made me wish it was my hand that was driving him so out of his mind.

Even though it hurt my neck to do so, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Despite his eagerness, he was unskilled. His teeth scraped against me multiple times and in response, I gripped his hair tighter and tried to pull him away, which only seemed to inform his appetite. The pain, the shock of each rasp, set me on edge, drew me back every time I got close to finishing. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought he was doing it on purpose. 

For a second time, he backed off, dragging his tongue languidly along the belly of my cock. He laid sloppy, open-mouth kisses on my skin. I dragged my hands through his hair, the webs of my fingers catching on tangles. 

It was cold and lonely, to have his mouth only covering half of me and I thrust aimlessly; his lips - wet, flaking bits of skin falling off them - drifted and folded up the shaft until he was able to capture the head between his lips again.

He flicked his gaze up at me - dark hair fluttering on and around his cheeks, a column of light falling on his face, he looked like one of Carravaggio’s boys, Boy With A Basket of Fruit, his head thrown back and his eyes wanting - and I was undone.

**Author's Note:**

> i think i got a ukrainian pun in there (fingers crossed)


End file.
